National

New Education Official Wants to Reform NCLB

Published

10 years ago

January 27, 2015

John King Jr., the new deputy secretary for the Department of Education, wants to reform the No Child Left Behind Act. (Freddie Allen/NNPA)

By Freddie Allen
NNPA Senior Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – John King, Jr., a highly-respected educator from New York City, says that teachers saved his life and in his new post as the deputy secretary at the Department of Education, he wants all children to have the support in school that he had growing up.

Both of King’s parents were life-long educators. His father, John King, Sr., was the first Black principal at an integrated school in Brooklyn, N.Y. and also served as a the deputy superintendent for New York City schools after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education banned “separate, but equal” practices in public schools.

In elementary school, King used to ride to work with his mother, Adalinda, who worked as guidance counselor at the middle school. When King was in the fourth grade, his mother suffered a heart attack at work. That night he went to the hospital with his father and the next morning, his father broke the news to him. His mother was gone. She was just 48. It was hard for the younger King to understand at 8 years old.

“Losing my mom in a lot of ways was the moment when school took on this much larger importance in my life,” said King. School became the safe harbor from the turmoil in his home life that slowly deteriorated after his mother passed away.

His father, then in his 70s, started to forget things.

“I didn’t know why he would forget things,” King recalled, though he later learned that his father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. “I didn’t know why he would be upset one moment and not upset the next.”

In an environment where there was a lot of instability, King said school was a source of stability, structure and support and for three years, from the fourth grade to the sixth grade, Alan Osterweil’s classroom anchored that stability.

In that class, King read the New York Times every day, memorized the capital and leader for every country in the world and performed Shakespeare. King said he felt free to be a kid.

“He set very high expectations for us,” said King. “Sometimes people think that kids will be overwhelmed by higher expectations, but I think that kids rise to higher expectations and one of the things that I experienced in his classroom was that his high expectations were motivating and encouraging to all of us. He also paid a lot of attention to a full range of subjects.”

King said that Osterweil saw his role as a teacher wasn’t just about conveying knowledge, but it was also about mentoring and supporting students.

John, Sr. died at 79, when John Jr., was 12 years old. He then lived with a half brother on Long Island and later, an uncle and aunt in Cherry Hill, N.J.

King said that he carried the lessons he learned in Osterweil’s class with him when he taught his own social studies class and co-founded a charter school in Boston, Mass., after attending Harvard University and earning a master’s degree at the Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.

Following in his parents’ footsteps, King dedicated his life to education, rising through ranks to become the first New York State education commissioner of African American and Puerto Rican descent in 2011. King was recently selected to become the deputy secretary of the Department of Education.

“Not only am I here doing this today because of that teacher, but I’m alive, because [Osterweil] provided stability during that period in my life,” said King.

In his new role, King will manage the agency’s major initiatives that includes working to revise President George W. Bush’s 2002 “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) law.

King noted that, by some measures, student achievement has improved since NCLB updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), originally signed into law in 1965.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, high school graduation rates for Black students (measured as the average freshman graduation rates) increased from 59 percent in 2006 to 68 percent in 2012, compared to White students who saw their graduation rates rise from 80 percent to 85 percent over the same time period.

The 2014 study “Building a Grad Nation” reported that when researchers began analyzing the effects of “dropout factories,” defined as schools where less than 60 percent of the students were graduating, almost half of all Black students attended one of them. By 2012, the report said, the number of Black students attended one of those schools had been slashed in half to 23 percent.

King said ESEA is really a civil rights law that was intended to ensure equity for all students across the country and there is still a lot of work to do.

“One of the problems with the NCLB law is that it focused just on absolute performance,” said King. “What we’ve tried to do at the department with the ‘waiver process’ is to focus on growth.”

Through the waiver process, the Obama administration freed more than 30 states and Washington, D.C. from NCLB’s stringent testing requirements, which often faced sharp criticism from educators and school administrators. Exempt school districts tracked the individual progress of students independent of how they ranked against other students on a standardized test.

More than a decade since NCLB was enacted, civil rights groups and Washington lawmakers are now focused on improving it.

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, recently issued a draft proposal aimed at reforming NCLB.

He suggested shifting more responsibility for designing programs that measure student achievement to state and local jurisdictions and also proposed limiting the Education Secretary’s ability to craft guidelines that direct instructional material, evaluation systems and “definitions of teacher, principal, or school leader effectiveness.’’

While Senator Alexander’s proposal shifts responsibility for targeted funding for at-risk students and teacher evaluation tools back to the states, civil rights groups want more federal oversight.

Nearly 30 civil rights and education advocacy groups united to express their concerns about the reauthorization of the ESEA in a joint statement.

The coalition recommended that each state provide annual assessments for all students in the third grade through the eighth grade and high school and that targeted funding be used to meet the needs of the most vulnerable children in our nation’s schools including youth in juvenile and criminal justice system. The group also said that states should expand data collection and reporting to parents and the public on student achievement, course-completion and graduation rates.

Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said his organization is deeply opposed to Senator Alexander’s approach to reauthorize ESEA.

“When President Johnson signed ESEA into law he said that the bill represented ‘the commitment of the federal government to quality and equality in the schooling we offer our young people,’” said Morial in a statement. “Yet, with this draft, Chairman Alexander moves our nation in the opposite direction and strikes at our most cherished civil rights principle: that every child has fair and equal access to a quality education regardless of family income, ZIP code, disability, language or race.”

Morial said that lawmakers must rewrite the bill and commit to strong federal oversight in education and equity in access to high quality instruction and resources for all students.

Morial continued: “This partisan bill, drafted with little input from civil rights partners, cannot be tweaked to meet the needs of the communities in which we serve. We believe that Chairman Alexander’s ESEA draft moves us backwards—it ignores equity, guts federal accountability and shifts resources away from children in most need.”

King echoed Morial’s concerns and said that the fear is that some of what has been proposed would be a step backwards from equity and opportunity.

“We know that for our kids, their best shot is if they have a high quality education that prepares them to be successful after they graduate from high school,” said King. “We have no future as a country if we don’t ensure that African American students get a high quality education, that Latino students get a high quality education, that our English language learners get a high quality education. Our future depends on ensuring that every student has the full range of opportunities.”

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Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas Honors California Women in Construction with State Proclamation, Policy Ideas

“Women play an important role in building our communities, yet they remain vastly underrepresented in the construction industry,” Smallwood-Cuevas stated. “This resolution not only recognizes their incredible contributions but also the need to break barriers — like gender discrimination.

Published

3 days ago

March 24, 2025

Oakland Post

Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), center, is shown with other guest speakers at the Sacramento Chapter of the National Association of Women in Construction brunch held at the State Capitol on March 6, 2025. On the left is Jennifer Todd, LMS General Contractors Founder and President. To Todd’s right is Dr. Giovanna Brasfield, from Los Angeles-based Brasfield and Associates. CBM photo by Antonio Ray Harvey.

By Antonio‌ ‌Ray‌ ‌Harvey‌, California‌ ‌Black‌ ‌Media‌

To honor Women in Construction Week, Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles), a member of the California Legislative Black Caucus (CLBC), introduced Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) 30 in the State Legislature on March 6. This resolution pays tribute to women and highlights their contributions to the building industry.

The measure designates March 2, 2025, to March 8, 2025, as Women in Construction Week in California. It passed 34-0 on the Senate floor.

Authored by Assemblymember Liz Ortega (D-San Leandro), another bill, Assembly Concurrent Resolution (ACR) 28, also recognized women in the construction industry.

The resolution advanced out of the Assembly Committee on Rules with a 10-0 vote.

The weeklong event coincides with the National Association of Women In Construction (NAWIC) celebration that started in 1998 and has grown and expanded every year since.

The same week in front of the State Capitol, Smallwood, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, Assemblymember Josh Hoover (R-Folsom), and Assemblymember Maggie Krell (D-Sacramento), attended a brunch organized by a local chapter of NAWIC.

Two of the guest speakers were Dr. Giovanna Brasfield, CEO of Los Angeles-based Brasfield and Associates, and Jennifer Todd, President and Founder of LMS General Contractors.

Todd is the youngest Black woman to receive a California’s Contractors State License Board (A) General Engineering license. An advocate for women of different backgrounds, Todd she said she has been a woman in construction for the last 16 years despite going through some trying times.

A graduate of Arizona State University’s’ Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, in 2009 Todd created an apprenticeship training program, A Greener Tomorrow, designed toward the advancement of unemployed and underemployed people of color.

“I always say, ‘I love an industry that doesn’t love me back,’” Todd said. “Being young, female and minority, I am often in spaces where people don’t look like me, they don’t reflect my values, they don’t reflect my experiences, and I so persevere in spite of it all.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 11.2% of the construction workforce across the country are female. Overall, 87.3% of the female construction workers are White, 35.1% are Latinas, 2.1% are Asians, and 6.5% are Black women, the report reveals.

The National Association of Home Builders reported that as of 2022, the states with the largest number of women working in construction were Texas (137,000), California (135,000) and Florida (119,000). The three states alone represent 30% of all women employed in the industry.

Sen. Susan Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and the California Legislative Women’s Caucus supported Smallwood-Cuevas’ SCR 30 and requested that more energy be poured into bringing awareness to the severe gender gap in the construction field.

“The construction trade are a proven path to a solid career. and we have an ongoing shortage, and this is a time for us to do better breaking down the barriers to help the people get into this sector,” Rubio said.

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Report Offers Policies, Ideas to Improve the Workplace Experiences of Black Women in California

The “Invisible Labor, Visible Struggles: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Workplace Equity for Black Women in California” report by the California Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute (CBWCEI), unveiled the findings of a December 2024 survey of 452 employed Black women across the Golden State. Three-fifths of the participants said they experienced racism or discrimination last year and 57% of the unfair treatment was related to incidents at work.

Published

3 days ago

March 24, 2025

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By McKenzie Jackson, California Black Media

Backed by data, a report released last month details the numerous hurdles Black women in the Golden State must overcome to effectively contribute and succeed in the workplace.

The “Invisible Labor, Visible Struggles: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Workplace Equity for Black Women in California” report by the California Black Women’s Collective Empowerment Institute (CBWCEI), unveiled the findings of a December 2024 survey of 452 employed Black women across the Golden State. Three-fifths of the participants said they experienced racism or discrimination last year and 57% of the unfair treatment was related to incidents at work.

CBWCEI President and CEO Kellie Todd Griffin said Black women have been the backbone of communities, industries, and movements but are still overlooked, underpaid, and undervalued at work.

“The data is clear,” she explained. “Systemic racism and sexism are not just historical injustices. They are active forces shaping the workplace experiences of Black women today. This report is a call to action. it demands intentional polices, corporate accountability, and systemic changes.”

The 16-page study, conducted by the public opinion research and strategic consulting firm EVITARUS, showcases the lived workplace experiences of Black women, many who say they are stuck in the crosshairs of discrimination based on gender and race which hinders their work opportunities, advancements, and aspirations, according to the report’s authors, Todd Griffin and CBWCEI researcher Dr. Sharon Uche.

“We wanted to look at how Black women are experiencing the workplace where there are systematic barriers,” Todd Griffin told the media during a press conference co-hosted by Ethnic Media Services and California Black Media. “This report is focused on the invisible labor struggles of Black women throughout California.”

The aspects of the workplace most important to Black women, according to those surveyed, are salary or wage, benefits, and job security.

However, only 21% of the survey’s respondents felt they had strong chances for career advancement into the executive or senior leadership ranks in California’s job market; 49% felt passed over, excluded from, or marginalized at work; and 48% felt their accomplishments at work were undervalued. Thirty-eight percent said they had been thought of as the stereotypical “angry Black woman” at work, and 42% said workplace racism or discrimination effected their physical or mental health.

“These sentiments play a factor in contributing to a workplace that is unsafe and not equitable for Black women in California,” the report reads.

Most Black women said providing for their families and personal fulfillment motivated them to show up to work daily, while 38% said they were dissatisfied in their current job with salary, supervisors, and work environment being the top sources of their discontent.

When asked if they agree or disagree with a statement about their workplace 58% of Black women said they feel supported at work, while 52% said their contributions are acknowledged. Forty-nine percent said they felt empowered.

Uche said Black women are paid $54,000 annually on average — including Black single mothers, who averaged $50,000 — while White men earn an average of $90,000 each year.

“More than half of Black families in California are led by single Black women,” said Uche, who added that the pay gap between Black women and White men isn’t forecasted to close until 2121.

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Five Years After COVID-19 Began, a Struggling Child Care Workforce Faces New Threats

Five years ago, as COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures began, most early educators continued to work in person, risking their own health and that of their families. “Early educators were called essential, but they weren’t provided with the personal protective equipment they needed to stay safe,” said CSCCE Executive Director Lea Austin. “There were no special shopping hours or ways for them to access safety materials in those early and scary months of the pandemic, leaving them to compete with other shoppers. One state even advised them to wear trash bags if they couldn’t find PPE.”

Published

3 days ago

March 24, 2025

Oakland Post

UC Berkeley photo.

UC Berkeley News

In the first eight months of the COVID-19 pandemic alone, 166,000 childcare jobs were lost across the nation. Significant recovery didn’t begin until the advent of American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) Child Care Stabilization funds in April 2021.

Today, child care employment is back to slightly above pre-pandemic levels, but job growth has remained sluggish at 1.4% since ARPA funding allocations ended in October 2023, according to analysis by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at UC Berkeley. In the last six months, childcare employment has hovered around 1.1 million.

Yet more than two million American parents report job changes due to problems accessing child care. Why does the childcare sector continue to face a workforce crisis that has predated the pandemic? Inadequate compensation drives high turnover rates and workforce shortages that predate the pandemic. Early childhood educators are skilled professionals; many have more than 15 years of experience and a college degree, but their compensation does not reflect their expertise. The national median hourly wage is $13.07, and only a small proportion of early educators receive benefits.

And now a new round of challenges is about to hit childcare. The low wages paid in early care and education result in 43% of early educator families depending on at least one public support program, such as Medicaid or food stamps, both of which are threatened by potential federal funding cuts. Job numbers will likely fall as many early childhood educators need to find jobs with healthcare benefits or better pay.

In addition, one in five child care workers are immigrants, and executive orders driving deportation and ICE raids will further devastate the entire early care and education system. These stresses are part of the historical lack of respect the workforce faces, despite all they contribute to children, families, and the economy.

The economic impact was equally dire. Even as many providers tried to remain open to ensure their financial security, the combination of higher costs to meet safety protocols and lower revenue from fewer children enrolled led to job losses, increased debt, and program closures.

Eventually, the federal government responded with historic short-term investments through ARPA, which stabilized childcare programs. These funds provided money to increase pay or provide financial relief to early educators to improve their income and well-being. The childcare sector began to slowly recover. Larger job gains were made in 2022 and 2023, and as of November 2023, national job numbers had slightly surpassed pre-pandemic levels, though state and metro areas continued to fluctuate.

Many states have continued to support the workforce after ARPA funding expired in late 2024. In Maine, a salary supplement initiative has provided monthly stipends of $240-$540 to educators working in licensed home- or center-based care, based on education and experience, making it one of the nation’s leaders in its support of early educators. Early educators say the program has enabled them to raise wages, which has improved staff retention. Yet now, Governor Janet Mills is considering cutting the stipend program in half.

“History shows that once an emergency is perceived to have passed, public funding that supports the early care and education workforce is pulled,” says Austin. “You can’t build a stable childcare workforce and system without consistent public investment and respect for all that early educators contribute.”

The Center for the Study of Childcare Employment is the source of this story.